Fascinating piece, Slacker. Some random thoughts.
1. First a standard academic cop out. That sort of research is outside my field; education and cognitive studies is not my stuff.
2. But, having said that, I'm aware of two sort of related pieces. The last time I read, in any sort of serious way, the research on Head Start programs, and that research was exceptionally well done, it was very successful. Just vastly underfunded. There were attempts to undermine the credibility of that research but, again, they failed. I'm not certain what's happened to it in recent years.
3. There was some research, many years back, on class based speech patterns which concluded something like this--they were formed early and tended to stick. I don't recall that was well researched. I wouldn't be surprised if it were more sort of qualitative observational than quantitative. But that's also a field that I haven't read in, since can't remember when.
4. I would not be at all surprised if the research were strong but might not support childhood education that early. If you try to imagine what sort of research design, how many subjects, how much intrusion into subjects lives, etc., it would take to do this sort of research right, you can imagine conclusions that would make sense but are not supportable at a sufficiently strong level for that much policy juice.
5. We also all know that this is unlikely to happen at a national level save with some minimal supporting dollars. I don't see a massive federal program--too many other competing demands for dollars, nor a state mandate of the sort they say Clinton favors--again, too many demands for too many dollars. But I can imagine seed money to demonstrate, not only the effect, but how to do the education. I don't see specific curricula, for instance, in that article--I may have missed it. If not, well, even if so, there will be a mad race to be the innovator of such.
Thanks again. Interesting piece.
Ah, one more thing. I hope this helps put reforming public education back on the public policy agenda--not privatizing it via vouchers but getting to attention focused on what to do with public education particularly in the sectors of our society in which it has been failing for a good long time. Basically, inner cities and rural areas. |
